Rabbi's Blog
The holy art of having nothing to offer
Every Sukkos we bind four plants together (etrog, lulav, hadas, arava) and we're taught they're four kinds of Jew: the scholar, the doer, both, neither, held as one people. True. But here's a reading I only came across recently, and I can't stop turning it over.
The etrog has taste and smell, that is you at your most balanced , learning and doing in easy harmony. I've got this.
The lulav has taste but no smell, that's the you that needs to pull back from the noise of the world and just know (connect with) Hashem, chase something deeper, even if the world has to wait an hour.
The hadas has smell but no taste, that's the you that says enough theory, someone needs help right now, and drops everything to go do it.
And the arava has neither, that's you on the day you've got nothing left to give . No wisdom, no energy. Just you, sitting in the sukkah with a cup of tea. I'm nothing today. And Sukkos says: that one's holy too.
Here's what I tend to do, and I think all of us do, we pick one "I'm a thinker," "I'm a doer" and call it who we are, maybe even our whole identity. Then every other part gets quietly filed under not me.
But watch the four kinds. Leave one out, even if it’s just one and the mitzvah is invalid. You can't even say the blessing. Four out of four, or its not a mitzvah.
You're the same. Wholeness is about being comfortable with recognizing who you are at this moment, the empty one is just as much a part of you as the balanced one, the seeker, the doer. Wholeness is never about being one thing, it's being able to be the you that you need to be when the moment calls for it, and knowing that all of it is you.
This Sukkos, bring all of yourself and come be with us. Get a lulav and etrog , sit down for the kiddush after services , drop by the Services and Subs , and dance on Simchas Torah everything's at harfordchabad.org/sukkot .
Wishing you and your family a joyous Sukkos and a chag sameach or in Yiddish gut yontif,
Our best Rosh Hashanah in years. That's the part that worries me.
Have we tried a Pencil?
There's an old story from the space race. Almost certainly not true, but it survives anyway, because the point is.
NASA discovers that an ordinary pen won't write in zero gravity. Engineers spend years, and a small fortune, developing a sophisticated "space pen" that will.
Someone asks what the Russians did.
Sometimes we get so sophisticated in solving a problem that we forget to ask whether we already own something that works. We commission studies. We measure affiliation, engagement, identity. We pour real resources into understanding how to make sure our children and grandchildren stay Jewish.
But maybe there's an obvious question we don't ask often enough: What produced the Jewish continuity we already have? Because on this one, we're not short on data. We have several thousand years of it.
The Jewish people have lived under just about every set of circumstances imaginable. Empires rose and vanished. We've known persecution and prosperity, isolation and assimilation. Nearly every external variable has changed at least once. And yet, here we are.
Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem, "You are standing here today, all of you." After thousands of years of Jewish history, those words land as almost astonishing: Still here and still standing.
In a letter written shortly before Rosh Hashanah, the Rebbe addressed exactly this question. Anything meant to last, he explained, needs foundations strong enough to hold up while everything around it changes. And Jewish history itself shows us what those foundations have been.
Toras Chayim, Torah as a way of life. For most of our history, Jews didn't pass Judaism down mainly by talking about Jewish identity. They lived Jewish lives. Shabbos. Torah. A mezuzah on the door. Tefillin. Kosher. Tzedakah. Homes built around Jewish rhythms and Jewish commitments.
None of this takes anything away from Jewish culture, memory, community, or identity. But there's a real difference between an expression of Jewish identity and a generator of it. One shows what's already there. The other makes more.
And so, as we walk into Rosh Hashanah, maybe the question isn't how we secure the continuity of the Jewish people.Maybe it's something much more personal:
- What am I doing that's worth continuing?
- What happens in my home because I'm Jewish?
- What will my children remember seeing me do?
- What Jewish practice will be more real in my life next year than it was this year?
That's the conversation I'm hoping we can pick up this Rosh Hashanah. Not a study of the Jewish people from the outside, a look at the one Jewish home each of us actually runs.
Pick one thing. One practice that would be a little more present in your home this year than last. That single pencil line, drawn and drawn again, is how a people that has outlived every empire keeps on standing.
Wishing you and your family a kesivah va'chasimah tovah, a good and sweet new year.
Same glass, very different view
There's an old Chassidic story about a poor man with a big heart.
He didn't have much, but whatever he had, he shared. So when a Rebbe and his followers once passed through his town, this poor man threw open his doors and hosted them all with everything he could scrape together. The Rebbe, moved by such open handed generosity, blessed him with wealth.
The blessing came true. The man grew rich, and then richer. But a strange thing happened along the way. As his fortune grew, his generosity shrank. The bigger his bank account, the smaller his open hand.
Word of the change reached the Rebbe, who decided to pay a visit.
The now wealthy man was delighted to see him and proudly walked him through his grand home. In the living room, the Rebbe stopped at a large window looking out onto the street. "Tell me," he said, "what do you see?"
"I see people," the man answered. "There's Yankel the water carrier, and Chaim the tailor."
The Rebbe then led him a few steps over to an ornate mirror on the wall. "And now what do you see?"
"Now?" the man said. "Now I only see myself."
"Notice," said the Rebbe, "that a window and a mirror are made of the very same glass. The only difference is a thin coating of silver on the back of the mirror. And yet that little bit of silver changes everything. The moment the silver gets in the way, you stop seeing other people. All you can see is yourself."
Wealth, the Rebbe was teaching, is that layer of silver. It isn't bad, but it has a way of slipping between us and everyone else until the whole world reflects back nothing but our own face.
Here's the part that reframes everything. The Rebbe reminded the man that his wealth had come with a condition. "You were given these blessings," he said, "so that you would share them."
This is one of the quiet themes of the month of Elul that leads up to Rosh Hashanah. Our Sages say the name "Elul" hidden as the initials of the verse "ish l'rei'eihu u'matanos la'evyonim" (Esther 9:22) "each person to his fellow, and gifts to the poor." Elul is the season of giving.
Look closely at how the Torah describes the giving. It doesn't say we hand our things to the poor. It says ish l'rei'eihu, "each person to his fellow." Not a benefactor above and a beggar below, but two equals. Because when you give tzedakah charity, you're not really giving away something that's yours. You're returning something that was placed in your hands to pass along. As the early Chassidim used to put it, "The piece of bread I have is yours as much as it is mine", and they would say "yours" before "mine."
Which means the poor man at your door, or the organization you support isn't the one who owes you thanks. In a real way, you owe them. Our Sages said it plainly: more than the wealthy man does for the poor man, the poor man does for the wealthy man. He's the one giving you the chance to become a window instead of a mirror.
And this isn't only about money. Every one of us has something to give, a kind word, a listening ear, an hour, a bit of encouragement, our knowledge, our patience. The very fact that G d arranged for you to cross paths with someone who needs something is itself the sign that you were the one meant to give it. Nothing in this world happens by accident.
It's no coincidence that we read Parshas Nitzavim, with all of Elul's themes gathered into it, right before Rosh Hashanah. Look at how the parsha opens: "You are standing today, all of you, before G d your L rd" (Deuteronomy 29:9). And then the Torah spells out who "all of you" means "the heads of your tribes, your elders and your officers… down to the one who chops your wood and the one who draws your water." The greatest and the simplest, shoulder to shoulder, standing on exactly the same ground before G d. No one above, no one below. Everyone simply there, as one.
On Rosh Hashanah we're going to stand before G d and ask Him to be generous with us, to grant us a good and sweet year that goes beyond what we've strictly earned. The way we open that door is by learning, this month, to give beyond what feels like it's "ours."
So this week, catch yourself at the mirror. Look for one small chance to turn it back into a window, to see the person on the other side of the glass and give something, anything, without keeping score.
Give a little more than feels comfortable. That's exactly how we ask G d to do the same.
May this year be, for all of us, a year of the test of wealth may G d bless each of us with such abundance that our only real challenge is deciding how much good to do with it.
Wishing you a wonderful Shabbos and a sweet, blessed year to come,
P.S. Let me share something more personal. Every year, in the weeks before Rosh Hashanah, Fraida and I sit down together and commit to a minimum amount of tzedakah we will give over the coming year. Then, before the next Rosh Hashanah comes around, we make sure we've fulfilled that pledge in full. I won't pretend it's always easy. Sometimes the account is tight right before the holidays, and the practical part of me hesitates, but we go through with it anyway. And every year it brings me back to the very question this story asks: am I really giving something away? Or am I simply passing along something that was entrusted to me to send forward? The answer, every year, is the second one. It was never only mine to begin with.
Guilty pleasures?
There's a little bit of guilt that sneaks in with the good things in life. You bite into a perfectly ripe peach, you sit back and relax, settling into your favorite comfortable chair after a long day, you enjoy a really good meal etc. and somewhere in the back of your mind a voice says, "Should I be enjoying this so much?
This week's Torah portion answers this question, through a basket of fruit.
A farmer works the field all year; plowing, planting, sweating, and waiting. Finally, the first fruits ripen and he now has the mitzvah of Bikkurim. He carries them all the way up to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and hands them over with a declaration of thanks to G-d.
Most offerings were burned on the altar. The first fruits were not . They were given to the Kohen to eat and enjoy. The most physical, most pleasurable thing you can do with a fig, is to eat it, and that is precisely how G-d wanted them used.
The Torah is teaching us two things at once. First, the farmer's declaration corrects a subtle mistake. It's easy to look at what we've built and think, look at me, "My strength and the power of my hand made me all this." (Deuteronomy 8:17).
Bikkurim, bringing the first fruits to the Kohen, is instead saying, "This is what You, G-d, have given me." It's not mine and I am being generous and sharing, it's Hashem’s that He entrusted to me.
And second (the deeper one), G-d doesn't want the fruits burned up and gone. Taste and pleasure can be holy. Hashem gives the world to us to enjoy .
This is one of the foundations of Chassidic thought: we don't serve G-d only when we're praying or learning. We serve Him while we're eating, while we're working, and while we're living an ordinary Tuesday. The peach isn't a distraction from the holy. The peach and all the pleasure we get out of enjoying it is holy, but only if we remember Whose peach it is.
It's no accident that we always read this portion just before Rosh Hashanah. When we recognize G-d as the source of everything we enjoyed this past year, we open ourselves to a year of even greater blessing, and even greater joy, in the year ahead.
This week, don't feel guilty about the peach or other permitted pleasures of the world, enjoy them, fully.
Make a blessing first, pause for a second, and send that enjoyment Upward. Enjoy the world, but make sure it's for G-d.
Wishing you a wonderful Shabbos and a sweet, blessed year to come,
G-d owes you money
Buried in this week's Parshah among its seventy-four commandments, is one of the most human laws in the entire Torah: "Give him his wages on his day; do not let the sun set over it." Pay your workers the same day, don't make them wait.
Here's where it gets interesting.
Our Sages teach that G-d keeps His own commandments; everything He asks of us, He does Himself. However G-d, who legislated against making a worker wait, appears to keep His own workers waiting a whole lifetime and then some.
The answer is that we've been picturing ourselves as employees. We're not!
G-d desired a home in the lowest place, down here, in this physical world where His presence is hidden. He handed the world over to us to make it into a place where He can live.
That's not an employee's task. That's a partner. A partner has a stake in the outcome. Not just working for the prize but building the very thing they are going to share in.
The big payoff, the profit that we split with G-d, comes at the end, in the World to Come. And what is it, exactly? Not a trophy handed to you for a job well done. “The reward of a mitzvah is the mitzvah." The closeness to G-d you create when you light a candle, give tzedakah, or sit with a friend who's hurting, that closeness is the wage. A partner doesn't get handed a prize separate from the business. They get to enjoy the very thing they built.
A partner in the middle of building still has to eat. You can't tend the flock on an empty stomach. So along the way, right now, this week, G-d is obligated, so to speak, to pay us our "wages and sustenance." The health, the livelihood, the doors that open, the obstacles that quietly disappear are all daily paychecks. Not a bonus. It's what makes it possible for us to do the work.
We're standing now in the month of Elul. Rosh Hashanah is a few weeks away. The judgment of Rosh Hashanah is, at its core, about the material; family, health, and sustenance. In the classic phrase: banei, chayei, umezonei.
The confidence we walk into that judgment with: not as beggars hoping for a handout at the courthouse door, but as partners in building G-d's home. No one starves their partner in the middle of a project. G-d wants you to have what you need, in abundance, precisely so you can keep building.
This Elul, don’t be the employee, grinding away, a little resentful, waiting for a payoff that feels perpetually delayed. Be the partner who understands that the work is the reward and that the paycheck arrives daily. Everything you've been given, your talents, your resources, the corner of the world that's yours, was handed to you for one reason: to build something with it.
You were never just working for G-d, you were building with Him.
The yeshiva boys looked naive, I was wrong
A couple of yeshiva students passed through Harford County recently. As people met them for the first time, you could see a certain reaction forming. These young men were warm, unhurried, and entirely at ease. There was a look in their eyes that's hard to describe. Someone said it kindly, with a slight edge: "They seem so… innocent." What they meant, and didn't quite say, was naive or sheltered. Like life hadn't gotten to them yet.
I wanted to explain what they were actually seeing, yet couldn't find the right words. Then I remembered that someone else had this exact reaction seventy years ago, said it out loud, and got an answer I've never forgotten.
In the 1950s, a Reform rabbi named Herbert Weiner spent several hours in private audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He later wrote about it in his book Nine and a Half Mystics. At one point, Weiner got bold. He told the Rebbe that all his Chassidim seemed to share one thing: a kind of open, naive look in their eyes. A sympathetic person, he said, might call it t'mimut , purity and a less generous person might call it something closer to emptiness and simple-mindedness.
It was a rude thing to say to a man's face about the people who loved him. However, the Rebbe didn't take offense. He leaned forward and said: what you see missing from their eyes is a kera, a split.
Most of us, the Rebbe explained, live divided. Part of us is in the "spiritual" world and part of us is in the "real" world. The two are constantly pulling against each other. That tension, that internal tug-of-war, is what reads on a face as depth and seriousness. The look of someone who has struggled. His Chassidim didn't wear that look because they didn't have that split. Their lives weren't cut in two. Where there's no war going on inside, there's no war to see on the outside. What Weiner mistook for emptiness was actually the opposite: wholeness.
And then the Rebbe did something remarkable. Weiner had mentioned, earlier, that he had trouble sleeping. The Rebbe gently turned the whole conversation around and suggested that Weiner's restlessness came precisely from trying to live in two worlds at once. The thing he'd diagnosed as missing from the Chassidim’s eyes was the very thing keeping him awake at night.
I think about that exchange every time I catch myself, or someone else, mistaking a divided life for a deep one.
This is exactly the word at the heart of this week's parsha, Shoftim. The Torah warns the Jewish people, right before they enter the Land, against imitating the practices of the surrounding nations: the sorcery, the omens, the séances, the attempts to contact the dead. And then it lands on a single instruction: "Tamim tihyeh im Hashem Elokecha" - "You shall be wholehearted with the L-rd your G-d" (Devarim 18:13).
Tamim. Same root as tam , the "simple son" of the Four Sons at the Seder. The one we quietly assume is the slow one.
Is the Torah's ideal really to be a little dim? To not think too hard?
No. Weiner's story is the key to why not. Tam doesn't mean unintelligent. It means undivided. Whole. Not the person who knows less, but the person who isn't at war with himself. He's not naive; he's just not split. He doesn't try to outsmart his own destiny or go digging in the dark corners of the universe for answers he was never meant to have. He isn't standing with one foot in each of the two worlds, forever negotiating between them. He's in one world, G-d's world, all the way.
Those yeshiva students aren't sheltered. They'd simply been spared a war that most of us fight every single day: the low-grade tug between the person we are in shul and the person we are in the parking lot. Between what we believe on Shabbos and how we live on Tuesday. That war is exhausting. It's also, if we're honest, what a lot of us have quietly come to call "being deep."
We should all notice one place where we're living split. One world in our head and another in our hands. Let’s try, just for a moment, to close the gap. Bring the Shabbos version of ourself into the Tuesday moment. You may find that what you'd been calling depth was really just fatigue. The wholeness you mistook for someone else's naivety is available to you too.
A candle, a baby, and everything you've forgotten
You wake up, check your phone and get ready for the day. Along the way, each of us has learned to put up a version of ourselves “a template” that feels safe to show the world. Most of the time it runs quietly in the background. However, here’s the thing: a template isn’t really you. It’s an edited version of you.
The Talmud says that before you were born, a candle was lit above your head. By its light, you were taught the entire Torah, every letter. Then, right before you entered the world, you forgot all of it.
Why teach a baby the whole Torah only to erase it?
This week’s portion opens with “Reeh Anochi”, “See, I place before you today a blessing.” Anochi , “I,” is the same word that opens the Ten Commandments: “Anochi”, “I am the L-rd your G-d.” What G-d gave at Sinai wasn’t only Torah, it was His essence, a piece of Himself inside each of us.
That’s what the candle really is. Not information, an imprint. The forgetting is real; you don’t consciously remember any of it, and yet it never left. It sits underneath every template and deeper than all of them: the part of you already connected to G-d before you’ve done a single thing to earn it.
This changes how we treat each other. That candle lit in every person, is the very same light. The Chassidic masters stress this again and again. The light of the person who seems to have wandered from Judaism is no dimmer then the regular Shul goer who eats only Kosher. It’s the same candle, perhaps just more hidden.
When we size someone up by their curated “template” self; how observant they look, how they dress, how put together they seem, we’re mistaking them for their external. We’re looking at the outside of the lantern and forgetting there’s a flame inside.
When we make someone feel they have to perform to belong, we’re unknowingly asking them to keep their candle hidden. When we accept people as they are, without commenting either verbally or with body language, without the quiet running scorecard, something opens up. We become the kind of place where a person’s inner light finally feels safe to come out.
This is exactly how G-d relates to us. “Yisrael alu b’machshava”, we arose in His thought. He doesn’t relate to our external, he sees the candle. When He looks at any one of us, He sees the flame He lit before we drew our first breath.
To make others feel welcome, let them be themselves. Hold their differences without judgment, it isn’t just being nice, it’s seeing people the way Heaven sees them.
Maybe, in learning to see the light in everyone else, we will finally trust that it’s burning in us too.
Good Shabbos and may you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.
My humility was the problem
Know the feeling of walking into a room and immediately feeling small? Not physically. The other people seem more put-together, successful, or sure of themselves. Did you ever think: I don’t belong here?
This week’s portion, Eikev, describes the desert our ancestors crossed toward the Land of Israel: “the great and awesome desert, of snake, serpent, and scorpion, and thirst where there is no water.”
That great desert is the exile mindset that lives inside a person. One looks out at the world and sees other peoples’ successes and assumes they have it all figured out. Then concludes: I am just a small fish in a big pond. The moment you decide the world is bigger than you, you’ve handed it a power over you it never actually had.
When a Jew is connected to Hashem, nothing in the world holds real authority over him. The haftarah this week says it clearly: kings will be your caretakers and their princesses your nursemaids.
So why do we feel small? We run the numbers wrong. We look in the mirror and see someone unimpressive. We look out the window and see something enormous. And here’s the sneaky part: it doesn’t feel like a spiritual problem. It feels like humility: “I’m just being honest about my place in the world.” But that’s not humility, that’s the opening move of exile. Real smallness before Hashem makes you bigger because you’re plugged into something infinite. Smallness in front of the great world out there just shrinks you.
Recently I started reading a book about major gift fundraising. The very first thing it tells you is that you have to change your mindset. Instead of thinking of yourself as someone asking, or, dare I say, begging, for support, recognize that what you’re really doing is making sure your mission and the donor’s own goal to make an impact (on Jewish life) are aligned. You’re not schnorring, you’re just checking whether alignment exists. It is the same conversation, yet a completely different approach.
That’s exactly our situation. Often we feel insecure, like the underdog, while someone else has all the power. But that’s not the truth. We are a piece of Hashem placed deliberately in this world to change it for good. We’re not begging the world to let us in. We’re encouraging it to align with its G-d given purpose of being a home for Him.
The next time you catch that feeling, in a crowd, at work, scrolling through someone else’s highlight reel, run the numbers again. You are not small or insignificant. You are a piece of Hashem, here on purpose, with a job only you can do. Walk into the room like you belong there, because you do.
The Call Without the Call Back
Have you ever done something good, put yourself out there, and walked away sure that you accomplished absolutely nothing? You made the call, showed up, said the thing, and got silence back. No thank you, no visible change, nothing. And you thought: well, that was a waste.
This week’s parsha, Vaeschanan, opens with Moshe setting aside cities of refuge. If someone accidentally killed a person, they could flee there and be safe. The Torah is very particular about the roads to these cities: they had to be kept in perfect repair, wide and clear, and at every single crossroads there had to be a sign reading “Refuge, Refuge,” pointing the way.
Picture the world before Waze. You’re on foot, in unfamiliar terrain, and your life depends on getting to the right place quickly. A signpost at the crossroads is everything.